Give Us Our Bread

INCARNATION. “OUR FATHER”. “GIVE US OUR BREAD”

11 January 1987

In the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.

Whenever we present ourselves before the face of God, we use the only prayer which our Lord Jesus Christ has left to us: the Lord's Prayer, ‘Our Father’. And there are two petitions on which I wish to attract your attention now.

The one, because we are still in the light and the glory of Christmas, of the day when an unbreakable kinship of nature was established between the Living God and fallen man to prepare a new kinship that will blossom out at the end of time when God shall be all in all, and when we shall be partaker (?) of the Divine nature; the words of which I think now are the first words of the Lord's prayer: “Our Father”.

When we read or when we pronounce these words we think of a parentship of men, of all of us, of that when we say «ours» we must outgrow the limitations, indeed the imprisonment in which we are in our whole (?) person. We must outgrow our individual being into the sense of belonging together with the whole Church and beyond it – with the whole mankind whom Christ has come to save.

But we must not forget (?) we ever remember that when we say ‘Our Father’ in the words of Christ, the ‘our’ binds us inseparably to the One Who is the Only-Begotten Son of God. To say ‘Our Father’ means that we recognise, we proclaim that the Father of Jesus Christ the Son of God is o u r Father; and that all, a l l the relationship between the Only Begotten Son of God and His Eternal Father m u s t become our relationship to Him... How great, how holy, how awesome this vocation of ours is; but how unutterably beautiful and full of hope, because God never gives a commandment which is not (?) and promise(d). A promise: which in the words of Saint Irenaeus will be fulfilled when, having been adopted by the love of God, in Christ, His Only Begotten Son, and by the power of Spirit, each of us singly and all of us together we will become the Only Begotten Son of God.

Let us reflect on this and prepare our hearts and our minds, and indeed, shape our lives in such a way that when we say (pronounce) ‘Our Father’, we become aware of our human kinship, but also of our vocational and already fulfilled incipiently kinship with Christ and, as it were, already, however incipiently, germinally, the sons and daughters of God in the very person of Christ.

And how does this happen? – and this is the second petition on which I would like to attract your attention: «Give us today our daily bread...»: which is this daily bread? God knows that we used sustenance for our bodies, for our temporary life; and this sustenance is of n e c e s s i t y for us because of the fall of man, because we are rooted not only in the Living God as Adam was, but also in the earth because we have lost the fullness of communion with God, and we must derive an ephemeral, a transitory life – but still life – from the earth, of which we, children of the dust, are taken.

But beyond this material bread which we need, and which is a reminder to us of our fall, we still must remember the words of the Old Testament proclaimed by Christ on the day of His temptation in the desert when He said, ‘It is not by bread alone that man shall live, but by every w o r d (W (?) of God: the creative word that brought us into being, the word that shaped us on the image of God, the word of teaching Whom we find in Christ, and /grasp the word of God Himself Whom we can listen to, contemplate, and follow as the Only perfect and true Man.

And again, another dimension: the Sacraments. The Bread (b (?)which we consecrate, which God makes by His power into His own Body and which He gives us as food no longer as (?) simply food derived from the dust, but food, indeed, taken from the earth but already mysteriously having become what all creation is to be: filled, pervaded, transfigured by the indwelling presence of God.

And this is, on each of these (?) the way in which we must and can become what we are called to be: the sons and daughters of the Most High.

May God give us, when we eat our food, remind us of our need, of our total dependence upon Love Divine and upon human love, and human /favour. Let us remember however that life is beyond this, and that it is through the word of God incarnate (?) that we come to life, in spirit, in mind, and heart, and body, and soul and ultimately – by communion (?) Body of Christ in the Divine Mysteries that we are launched on this journey which will end so gloriously and which we can anticipate in gratitude, in awe, in joy in Christ, in the Spirit and in the Father. Amen.